This Veteran Book Editor Thrives On Looking Ahead Remembering

Charles "Charlie" Gerras of Coopersburg says that "after a while you don't think of your life as life in a wheelchair. Everybody has something they work around.

"My life turns on things like whether you're happy with your job, whether things are happy with your wife, whether the kids are driving you crazy or not."

Charlie, 56, senior editor of the book division at Rodale Press, has been a quadriplegic in a wheelchair for nearly 35 years.

He grew up in Allentown near 12th and Allen. He was Central Catholic '47.

"I loved to read books. I thought I died and went to heaven when I found out you could do that in school."

At 22, he had just finished his undergraduate years at Georgetown University as an English literature major, was investigating graduate schools and thinking ahead to a career as a college English teacher.

It was June 1951. He was at Larchmont, N.Y., for the wedding of his college roommate when he went off a diving board into Long Island Sound while the tide was out. "I was not used to thinking about tides."

He hit solid sand. It broke his neck.

He spent nearly a year in hospitals - first at New Rochelle. "At that time, people with this kind of spinal injury rarely survived. People didn't know what to do with me."

After four months, Charlie was transferred to Sacred Heart in Allentown. He says it was his good luck that Dr. Dominic Donio trained in physical medicine at the Rush Institute in New York and talked Sacred Heart into creating such a department.

"It was a new idea, and he was feeling his way."

The nurses were so professional, he says. "Those were the days Sister Antoinette ran it with an iron hand."

The first physical therapy sessions nearly did Charlie in. He says he was a "basket case" at the end of those early efforts.

Finally, he went home and home was a two-story house. It meant his father had to carry him up and down the steps to the second floor each morning and night.

So the family moved to a one-story on Chapel Avenue on the South Side. And it was from there that Charlie improved enough to work as a volunteer at Jefferson School where Margaret Herrity and Esther Trexler ran classes for crippled children.

"There were a lot of kids with speech impediments. I went in and stayed a few hours. That was very good for me. You need a place to go and somebody expecting you there to do some work."

At college, he had met Anne Bell of Chester. After college, she had gone to work for the CIA in Washington. She quit her job in 1955 to marry Charlie.

"I was more nervous than she was. It involved a lot more commitment than most people make.

"I didn't have a job. Anne had quit her job. People must have thought we were crazy. I wouldn't want my kids to get in something like that."

About a year later, he applied for a job at Rodale Press. He went up the freight elevator at 6th and Minor streets in Emmaus for his interview with Bob Rodale.

Weeks later, a phone call came from publisher J.I. Rodale's office. There was a job - being a researcher for J.I. at his old Allentown office at West and Walnut.

On Charlie's first work day there was a blizzard. "I insisted my father take me to work that day. I was so afraid of losing that job if I didn't show up."

When they got there, they found no one else had gone out that day.

The building housed a staff of four - counting Charlie - for Prevention Magazine, then with a circulation of 25,000. It has a circulation of three million today.

His father carried him up the eight stairs into the building in the early days. But Charlie took it upon himself to have a neighbor build a wooden ramp onto the back of the office. "It was nervy of me. I didn't ask permission," he says.

Researching led to writing and a move to Rodale's quarters in Emmaus.

He started Quinto Lingo, a language magazine that reached 100,000 circulation before Rodale sold it. Usually it was articles in English with translations in French, Spanish and German. "I loved doing it. You could write on anything."

Then, Rodale wanted to get into book clubs and health books. In this work, Charlie has written three or four books on health. As an editor, he works on anywhere from three to 10 books a year. Sometimes, he has five or six going at the same time.

One, "The Complete Book of Vitamins," has sold 900,000 copies. Another, "The Book of Common Diseases," has reached 680,000.

Charlie has a new project - a book club with a volume every two months containing the condensations of five self-help books. "If it makes money, everybody had a good idea. And if it doesn't, then why did I do that."

Charlie maintains that he's really not a story. He points out he had the educational tools. He says a real story would be some guy in a wheelchair who didn't have his opportunities for an education and yet still made it.